NLPC has uncovered a plan by the White House New Media operation to hire a technology vendor to conduct a massive, secret effort to harvest personal information on millions of Americans from social networking websites.The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”

While the solicitation specifies a 12-month contract, it allows for seven one-year extensions. It specifies no dollar cap. Other troubling issues include:

extremely broad secrecy terms preventing the vendor from disclosing to the public or the media what information is being captured and archived (page 7, “Restriction Against Disclosure”)

wholesale capturing of comments by non-White House staff on publicly accessible sites

capturing of content of any type (text, graphics, audio, or video)

capturing of comments by both Obama critics and supporters, with no restriction as to how the White House would use the information.

This is not some nut job conspiracy theory, but an actual use of your tax dollars to violate your privacy and use the power of the federal government to monitor and attack political opponents.

I guess dissent is only the highest form of patriotism when it’s the Left doing it.

After flag@whitehouse.gov and the spam e-mails from Axelrod, this is the third blatant attempt by the Obama White House to misuse private data . And don’t be surprised if this ties in with pending legislation to give President Obama ’emergency control’ of the Internet.

Some elements at the White House already consider anyone who opposes Obama’s policies ‘right wing domestic terrorists’. Shutting down your First Amendment rights could be just one phony Reichstag Fire-style incident away.

This needs to be brought to President Obama’s attention publicly – so if it’s a case of some rogue staffers going out of bounds to please the boss, he can either repudiate it and stop it…or reveal a little something about himself to the American people.